LabVIEW Idea Exchange

As soon as we have more complicated data structures (e.g. clusters of arrays), a large portion of the FP real estate is wasted taken up by borders, frames and trims, etc.

We need a palette full of "Amish" 😉 controls, indicators, and containers that eliminate all that extra baggage. We have a few controls already in the classic palette, but this needs to be expanded to include all types of controls, including graphs, containers, etc.

A flat control consists of a plain square and some text (numerical value, string, ring, boolean text, etc). A flat container is a simple borderless container.  A flat graph is a simple line drawing that would look great on a b&w printer. A flat picture ring looks like the image alone.

They have a single area color and a single pixel outline, if both have the same color, the outline does not show. They can also be made transparent, of course. If we look at them in the control editor, there are only very few parts.

Now, why would that be useful?

Let's have a look a the data structure in the image. There is way too much fluff, distracting from the actual data. If we had flat objects, the same could look as the "table" below. Note that this is now the actual array of clusters, no formatting involved! It is fully operational, e.g. I can pick another enum value, uncheck the boolean, or enter data as in the cluster above.

Many years ago in LabVIEW 4, I actually made a borderless cluster container in the control editor and it looked fine, but it was difficult to use because it was nearly impossible the grab the right thing with the mouse at edit time.

The main problem of cours is that the object edges completely overlap, making targeted seletion with the mouse impossible. (For example the upper right corner pixel is the corner of an array, a cluster, another array, and an element at the same time.)

So what we need is a layer selection tool that allows us to pick what we want (similar to tools in graphics editing software). It could look similar to the context help shown in the picture with selection boxes for each line. Picking an object would show the relevant handles so we can intereact with the desired object. Another possibility would be to hover over the corner and hit a certain key to rotate trough all near elements until the right element is selected, showing it's resize handles. I am sure there are other solutions.

As a welcome side effect, redrawing such a FP is relatively cheap.

There's a common convention in LabVIEW where if a control is not a required input, you place the default value in parentheses:

 For the most part this make sense and is useful when calling VIs, but there is one place where it's really annoying:

We know there's no error by default. I suggest that NI simply remove this. This can be done today by going to <vi.lib>\errclust.llb and modifying the control, but that's annoying to do with every installation.

I would even go so far as to say that NI should write a VI which will go through vi.lib and remove the text from all the existing VIs. I doubt this would have any backward compatibility issues, because I think the only place where those would be relevant is if someone is calling a VI in vi.lib dynamically AND setting the error in value, and frankly, those people deserve to be punished.

It has come up in discusssions that NI does not really cater to hobbyists. A cheap and functional version of LabVIEW is limited to the student edition, which is restricted to a small subset of potential users.

 From the  FAQ:

"The LabVIEW Student Edition is available to students, faculty, and staff for personal educational use only. It is not intended for research or institutional use."

As a suggested first step, I suggest to remove the academia restriction and mold it into a new product:

--- LabVIEW personal edition ---

Licensed as follows:

"The LabVIEW Personal Edition is for personal use only. It is not intended for commercial, research or institutional use."

 It would be available to anyone for noncommercial home use.

LabVIEW currently has the home use exemption that allows installing a copy at home. Unfortunately, if you lose your job, you not only lose your health insurance, but you also lose access to LabVIEW, thus hampering any self paced LabVIEW tinkering that possibly would improve future job prospects. I am sure many retired LabVIEW engineers would love some recreational LabVIEW use. They could be a great asset, because they will have more time helping out in the community and forums. They could even give guest presentations at user group meetings, for example.

The LabVIEW personal edition should include all modules of interest to the hobbyist, including application builder, embedded, FPGA, and robotics.  We should be able to distribute built applications as freeware. Support would be limited to community support.

Installing LabVIEW on every single private home computer in the world would cost NI exactly nothing (except for some sales of the current student edition which is about the price of a textbook, some internet bandwidth, and loss of the zero to two (?) multi-millionaires who actually bought the NI developer suite for themselves. ;)). 99.9% of users would never touch it, but that 0.1% could come up with great new application areas and would help spread the word on how great LabVIEW really is. Soon 0.2% would use it. 🙂

It should follow the "customer class limited" Freemium model, (as defined by Chris Anderson), i.e. limited to personal home use in this case.

The running applications should be clearly identified to prevent commercial use. The splash screen and "about" screen should prominently display the words LabVIEW and National Instruments and could even be used for NI advertising and product placements, for example.

Hi all,

What I'm asking for is an optional indication of reentrancy in the context help window.

This would save the user from having to open VI Properties on several VIs, and would be particularly useful when viewing the VI hierarchy.

I realize that Greg Freeman suggested something similar.  My intent here is to narrow down several ideas from that conversation down to a single suggestion.

(I hope I still didn't manage to post a duplicate. Apologies if I did.)

Thanks,

Jim

Not so much an idea, as a wish/plead/rant:

Please make the next version of LabVIEW a major update of the features we have available to create user interfaces.

2011 was the "improved stability" version. 2014 should be the year it became simple and fun to create user interfaces that blow everyone's socks off. I'm not even talking about fancy stuff, just get the basics right!  Fix the graph indicators, and provide better front panel scaling options - and that alone will make 2014 the best update ever(!).

I started writing a list of all the things I find bad with the graph/charts for example, and found out that it would be better to just do a search here on the idea exchange to see how many ideas mention graphs alone. 2390 ideas! (yes, I have not gone through them all to filter out the ones that do not actually request changes to the graphs, but most of them do, directly or indirectly...). My own little list started like this, in random order:

Graphs and charts

1. You cannot stack plots in any of the graph indicators, only in charts
2. Number of plots stacked cannot be varied at run-time
3. Annotation properties are only partially available programmatically
4. Auto-scaling cannot be restricted to one way-only, it's behaviour cannot be configured in any way
5. Legends, palettes and tools do not fit together to form an organized user interface, nor are they possible to detach from eachother to get more flexible designs/scaling for ecxample...
6. XY graphs become sluggish and almost unusable with large data sets, where alternatives written in other languages have no performance issues
7. Plot colors could automatically adjust to the chosen background color - suggesting unique colors for the added plots that provide the best possible
visibility.

8. Graphs on e.g. Google and Yahoo have tonnes of cool features like animated zooming, thumbnail graphs, highlighting of the plot you hover the mouse over etc. which provide a very interactive feeling, you can achieve some of this in LV as well, but it could/should be possible with little or no programming

9. To get charts to accept data with variable sample rate (delta X) is possible, but cumbersome and an almost hidden feature...

Mixed signal
1. You cannot set the group names programmatically
2. The number of plot areas is not configurable at run-time
3. You cannot assign plots to a given group programmatically
4. You cannot show the visibility checkbox of each plot etc.

And then you have the additional 2000 ideas...;-)

As for front panel scaling there are not that many ideas (naturally), but the impact/value of them would change every LabVIEW programmer's life significantly. We can stop spending so much time finding ways around limitations in LV, and start focusing on the actual goal of our applications.

Would that not make everyone's day?

Currently text in an "unbundle by name" node is centered. This makes for poor readability when there are several elements being unbundled.

I think that changing the justification from center to left does improve readability.

Note 01: This apply to bundle by name as well.

Note 02: implementing this idea my gave us this one for free.

I would be surprised if this is not a duplicate but I was unsuccessful finding it.

The subject says it all. Simply add a scrollbar to free text labels. I sometimes use a string constant for free labels simply because they can have a scrollbar.

Block diagram string constants have a useful feature "Size to text" which is accessible through the standard right click menu.  One way in which this is useful is to ensure that information in an array of constants is not hidden: Right click on an element of a string-constant array and select "Size to text" and it will expand to show the full length of all the strings it contains.

What's needed is an equivalent for numerics (including rings and enums).  When dropped singly, these constants expand and shrink around their contents.  But if you drop a numeric constant on an array constant, it takes the size of the numeric and can only be expanded manually.  If you then enter a constant that is longer, only the first part will be shown, and there is no indication that the values are truncated.  (see image)

I think that arrays of numeric constants should resize to show everything entered, automatically.

There are several great ideas on this Idea Exchange that were marked as Completed because they were implemented in NXG.

Although arguments could probably have previously been made that this wasn't really "complete" for most requestors, it was reasonable given the idea that NXG would replace LabVIEW 202x.

Given the updated fate of NXG, can these posts all be reevaluated and marked as either New or In Development, as appropriate?

If the evaluation is too effort-intensive, can they all be marked as New again?